The Black Book

by Lawrence Durrell

  Or else at night, in the open car, under the milky brilliance of the sky, confess my sins and ponder on the Logos with the precocity of adolescent despair. I have the sensation of dying, from the roots of the toes upward, being consumed like the asphodels after a late season. These downtown women remind me of you. The contortions of a whore will suddenly open your face brightly for me, with the eyes sitting there, hard, crooked, merciless as diamonds. The summer is like a drain, choked with filth and bloody rags. This desk is the pulpit from which I infect the world with my despair. The auditors are in, sticking a friendly spanner into the obsolete machinery of the school. Eustace has begun his duel with me. If he arrives first in the morning he will put every bill, form, receipt, ledger, voucher, on my desk, and absolve himself of guilt. At lunchtime, when he goes, I will direct the whole stream back on to his desk. This game will go on until Petitt the auditor flutters in, with his nose bleeding and quills behind the ear, to settle everything. After that there is nothing to do but listen to Eustace deploring his wife’s fertility. “I just hang me trousers on the bed,” he says poignantly, “and she’s clicked again. It’s not logical. I don’t know what happens. I reely don’t.”

  Then, out of all this routine, this sifting of bills and candidates, comes a wire from Tarquin, asking me to meet him at the station. I find him in a first-class carriage, swathed in a rug, with a soft hat drawn down over his eyes. His face bland, sexless, with the queer stony significance of an Arabic cipher. He moves stiffly about, gathering his luggage, appearing not to notice me. When I speak to him he does not answer. We go out like ghosts together, to where the car is parked.

  Suddenly I am aware that there is something wrong. I see his face framed across the corrugated iron roof, the bubble of soot and steam, the brood-mare whinnying of engines. It is set in a fixed frigidity as if he had lost the use of his muscles. He tucks the rug round him and settles down, brooding. The car is gathered up in the lines of traffic. I say nothing. Presently he will tell me what it is that nervous, lapidary voice of his. Now. His lips open, but he turns his head away silently. Faint graph of his bony cheek against the lighted shops. Then he speaks miserably, folding his virginal lips round the words, as if reluctant to let them escape him. “I had a woman,” he says, turning away. A silence. I am absorbed in the traffic. He rearranges the rug, and coughs. Then with a deadly impersonality he begins to speak again. Such an icy aloofness, he might be offering a definition for a dictionary. “I had the wrong idea,” he says. “She lies down and arranged her legs like compasses. But of course you know? Do you know? Shape of an M. I have never seen anything so obscene in my life.” He laughs shakily. “She catches hold of you and sort of corks herself up with it.” He gives a little cough and sits there, upright and pale, with the rug gathered round him as if he had received an electric shock. We swing down the long lighted streets homeward, and all the time he is sitting there at my side, whispering and muttering quietly. “I am finished,” he tells himself. “Finished. Done for. Ended. From now on it’s going to be different.” His eyes watch his own reflection on the windshield with the queer bloated look of an octopus. In order not to think I drive as fast as possible. The doom is growing again, the nostalgic panic of these provinces, which kills these men. And Tarquin is here, looking as if he were bleeding to death under the rug.

  We arrive, and with the same chaotic imbecility he watches the porter unstrap his bags and carry them up. In his room he lies down immediately on the bed and closes his eyes. The air is heavy. The windows remain shut. Everything is the same; nothing has been touched. The Japanese prints, the microphotographs of the spirochetes, the red handbill of the lock hospital, the pipe rack picturesquely impending with its untouched briars. Dust on the rack of books, Isidore Ducasse, Huysmans, Rolfe, Dowson, Pope, Strachey, etc. His American cousin strains out of her frame like a goose, and recalls that voice I heard on the phone once. “Tell him not to be so dizzy. He’s gotten to be a moral leper these days.” The cash-register voice of a new continent. His diaries lie on the shelf, waiting for the revelation, the Chinese ink, the Roman numerals, the Gothic script. What will he write?

  “You can’t understand my death,” he says at last. “A fuck’s a fuck to you. Emotionally you’re a ploughboy still. Open my suitcase, will you? In the bottom left-hand corner you’ll find some eau de Cologne.” I obey him. He saturates a handkerchief in the scent and presses it to his forehead, I sit here miserably on the stool, trying to read the names of the folios on the music rack. The light is very dim, shining from the piano in the corner.

  “Clare is back,” I say.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  All of a sudden a curious convulsion shakes the bed. The springs begin to twitter. I stand up in alarm and see that the corpse on the bed is weeping. His mouth hangs down, wobbling open, twisted up sideways into a deckle-edged grin. The handkerchief covers everthing except his mouth, from which comes this taut, painful pissing.

  Immediately I see Miss Smith’s red dish of laughter widening, running down her sleeves. The humour pouring from the wet nigger grin like a stream of gongs falling over us in an ocean of discord—until we are floundering down again into the annihilation of the lost continents.

  Afraid, I run out into the passage. Everything is quiet with the hallowed quietness of an English Sunday evening. I am suffering from a sort of mindless hysteria. I perform a number of silly acts, without reason, except that I must not think. The hotel with its ant life, its corridors, its somnolent billiard room and lounge, surrounds me.

  I open a book and see you standing out there, like a whipped bitch among the apple trees. It is not good enough, my beautiful id. On the title-page there is Sappho meditating under the terrific eyeballs of the night sky, the sea curling away under the white rock, the holly trembling at the moon, the silver riders galloping toward Crete. Turn your face to the sea wall, and listen to the noisy lungs of the water under the cliffs. The moon crawling across the warm tiles, and the whole Greek world gathered in a single knot of agony in the left breast. The night moving one way and the sea another, and the body torn in two by them. Or is it Gracie in her English room going blind as a collie among the starched collars? Gracie and Sappho sharing the last dazzling jump into history. The water closing. The tactless sea in many husbands of silver treading the white meat under the cliffs, breathing among the statues and the chorus. Good-bye.

  In his room Lobo is sitting on the bed in his elegant continental smoking, waiting for the hour to strike. To improve his technique he is working himself in the mirror. “Working”, he calls it. “Working” a woman. His eyes enlarge and diminish, registering every insinuation between oriental eroticism and sheer delirium. I sit in the chair, and he does not speak to me. He is absorbed in his own wonderful art: crucified by this technique which he operates from the leering Maya lecher’s mask.

  “Tarquin,” he says at last, absently, “says I was cicisbeism. Hot dog, eh?” He is allowing the supplication to run from his eyeballs like melted butter. Lobo is walking in that void with crooked fingers and the hunger of the woman on him. He is never satisfied, deep down. There is always this panic hunger which ends in a kind of febrile hysteria or brutality. “When I cover a woman,” said Perez once, “when I cross her and get into her—I am home.” But Lobo is never home. The womb is his target, but he misses it. Something intervenes, a letter, a bill, a calculation, a fit of weeping, blood, nostrums, fear. He is forever sitting inside the barbed wire, planning new apocalypses which abort; new detonations which fizzle down in black powder. The mirror records his despair for him. I am sitting here biting my nails, trying not to think of Tarquin. So much of his agony in the garden is mine. When he speaks I try not to understand. I try not to implicate myself in the process, the machinery of despair. I try to read nothing but the actual words of the green diary, sans undertone, overtone, rumour. It is not mine, I tell myself, not mine. I have other problems. And yet I can’t get out of my mind
the details of that holiday in Brighton. The ennui. The slowly stagnating hours of despair which followed Tarquin’s experience. It is a little hysterical-making. He went everywhere to try and blot out the thought, to dances, museums, theatres. In a cinema he thought he might be drugged for a while. “Then I had one of my ideas. It was all those people in there, fuggy, lousy, damp, sitting in rows. And I thought suddenly of the millions of jaws of rotten molars around me, the rotting flesh of their bodies: I tell you there must have been several hundred tubes of shit laid up alongside of me in there, palpitating!”

  His vehemence is terrifying. He is paralysed. He cannot speak. He cannot move. His tears are clotted in his mouth, his throat is full of rocks. As he speaks he goes across to the washbasin, turns on the tap, and begins to spit and spit, as if he would never be done with it.

  In the night, when I watch him sitting at his piano, playing to his brain, I know that it is not the madness that counts, essentially counts. It is the ticking of the deathwatch which reminds me of the true focal sepsis. Death perhaps, the worm trailing its slime across this room, these books, this piano. I am so small myself, so utterly incapable of laying even my own ghosts, that I dare not take the responsibility of his. That is why it is so difficult to write about him—I am by implication mapping out my own scenario of despair when I see him standing at that white washbasin, spitting and spitting. And in a lesser degree the same is true of Lobo, of Perez, of all these antic maniacs who live like jiggers in the soles of my feet. That is why I am sometimes afraid of going mad. I have a blinding second’s revision of all that I know, believe, doubt, reverence, adore: your face, his face, the skull in the mirror, the knave, the jester, the fool—and I am afraid.

  This idea is perhaps not unfamiliar to you. I have reached a dead reckoning somehow. Sunday follows Sunday like many crucifixions, and I have utterly no sense of progression. On the twelfth night of a year already ancient we have rain, rain in a long line of opening razors. It is threshing down the grain, raping the orchard where the apple trees stand like Caliban; where you are lying no doubt with your womb full of loam and the foxgloves touching your nipples. Nothing passing across the arena of smudged hills but the velveteen gamekeeper with the beaded steel gun. It is always the old year here: an old year—“a blind old bitch, gone in the teeth!” The bodies of the wise men sifting down their essence of action to apples and grain and cider; the green counties lifted up to me like the mouth of my girl. The churches solemn among the lichen graveyards. In Memoriam; on the grass the marble stumps, like a mouthful of rotten teeth.

  In these days we are wild: a drunken, whoring, perilous crew, aimless as lunatics, racing our own magic from place to place, sinking and smiling among the dying bottles. Laugh and the world laughs with you, suffer and you suffer alone. I gather your face up like a goblet of brandy and drink it solemnly, mouth, eyes, hair, nose, lips, canines, lobes, dimples, tics—everything in a gulp. Tomorrow—what is that? Today there is an amputated centrum in which all activity is devoted to itself. Tomorrow there will be fresh air on my jowls, there will be children squealing, papers, ink, slovenly work meaning nothing. Madame About gathering her defensive guts round that knob in her womb. But tonight I am absolved, in a kind of paralysed way I am free. I can brighten my lips with spittle and shine forth like an ogre. I can choke you in images, who are only an image yourself; I can smile among the candles and the bottles that taste of sand. I can grovel in my own sick and devour my own dung. I can die—or sleep.

  Page by page this noctuary gets completed. Images. clouds. Shadows in ink. Frankly, I know not what I do. There is Miss Smith, wearing a moth-eaten muff in midsummer, and Lobo in his natty suiting with the subdued stripe. They are going to Canterbury for the day. Blessings on you, my children. Behind the altar screen, the great resonant goth glooming over them, the Abbey with its blue greys, its tooth-white, curd-yellow. In this aura of prehistory he tries to kiss her. She stands solid all of a sudden, turned away, petrified. He is giving a few Peruvian groans and kissing her fingers. All of a sudden she starts hissing. Her mouth is open and vermilion. Flights of geese spit and whirl among the arches. She is closed up by an invisible spring. They go out in agitation and enter a tea-shop. He is afraid she is mad. She laughs incessantly all the way home, touching her shoulders with each ear, this black goose spitting in her own handbag. At night he sits in his room with dumb perplexity, asking why she laughed. Why? “Is she virgin, dear boy?” He is tremendously interested, angry, piqued, sore, puzzled, keen.… I can see that he plans to add her to the album. For fun I tell him a few lies. “Virgin?” I say with fine indignation. “What do you mean—virgin?” It is good to watch the interest, the exultation, drain out of his face like water out of a bath. His mouth is open. Everything is pouring into it, draining away. In that case, he says, she was trying to make a fool of him. Can you imagine it? The negress standing in the Abbey, a laughing logarithm, flapping her wings and laughing. Bah!

  At night, perhaps, if there is nothing else to do, a visit to the corpse that inhabits Tarquin’s tea-green dressing gown. We sip Bovril with genteel affection, like a couple of spinsters, or play cards at the green folding table.

  “You are grateful, you say, for being made to think, to weigh, to analyse?” asks the hero in carefully simulated surprise. “You thank me for the death I am transmitting? I assure you, my lad,” and so on. I accept these morsels humbly. Humility and divinity—are they not the same thing? Consolation! Courage! One day when you are a big boy you shall have a teddy to play with.

  “Your trouble is that you are young. Your ideas are eoan—you see false dawns breaking all over the place. You actually hope. Until the Platonic poison is out of your system you cannot begin. Stop imagining an impanate Christ, first of all. Bread must become bread, nothing more or less. This tea tastes of urine, does it not? No, it’s your turn. Contemplate the world which has created you, my dear, and see where you stand.”

  There is no answer to this except that I know nothing of the world which created me. Nothing. I am a sort of ticker tape, through which life runs its ribbon of shabby pulp. What is written on it I cannot tell. A love letter perhaps, or a report of famine, or a poem, or a description of a new disease.

  “Dear Puck,” you say, “the guest has come without warning, so that I am afraid the house isn’t ready for him. Spring. By the lake you can hear the copulation of the frogs, like smooth pebbles being rubbed together. They are dying in quantities, their veins are shot with blood. It is good when we lie down together to keep remembering the death all around us, in the clouds, in the lake, in the woods where summer is chained up like a blind man. It is death that makes our love adult, the death of the grain. It is so bitter when we are together, but, like salt, really nourishing. Death is a wonderful discipline. Do you understand me? Good night.”

  You are no longer afraid. The spring is your ally. The one season you properly understand, answer in your bones. But now that the blind man summer has broken his rusty chain and got free—what now? Shall we make some fine alkaline poems to neutralize this dust, this soma fever?

  Dear Alan. I am alone again. This book is not a statement of a path, but a quarrel with destiny, that is why it is necessary for you to understand it. The summer is largely responsible—not to mention the little death. I was thinking tonight of those summer days in the shadow of the priory. They seem to belong to another world—a world of shapes which included such colours as warmth, charity, love, etc. A whole dormant Platonic principle which, in its essence, is England—the marrow and bone of England. This is a very necessary valediction, not only to England, but, if you like, to the world. It will hurt you, but it is the truth. I have looked into my account—the account that seemed so full and heavy with new cash—and found hardly a coin that will ring properly on wood. There was nothing for it but to empty my wallet into the dust and take the road again; without dramatics this time, without heroics—not to mention lymphatics. It is queer to remember that this decision was already
shaping itself that afternoon, when we stood on the southern tower of the priory, hanging in the breeze, breathless and exulting like sea birds. All that was the island then, was represented in that humorous razored profile of yours—the predatory nose of the Middle Ages, the Goth singing in your blood, the music you gathered up in those nervous fingers and transmitted, crazy with your own enthusiasm. Southward, like a green beating heart, the flats stretched away into the mist. The myth weathering softly on the corbels, the fragile spines of the windows with their armorial bearings, the buttresses flying into an eternity of childish history. We were hanging up there, like flies, over the Saxon river, watching the tonsures cross the leads in meditation. Irrational thoughts and feelings wheeling up over me, whewing like gulls, sombre. It was in that time that I began dimly to see the equation which was finally printed in my brain here, over the Ionian. It was the temptation of the devil, the vision of the cities offered to me from an immense mountaintop. The devil! What should be more plausible than that you should be the Black Saint himself—panurgic, long-nosed, calculating bastard that you are! You were offering me, in your oblique way, the whole of England—the masques, the viols, the swans, the mists, the doom, the fogs: you were offering me a medieval death in which I could live for ever, stifled in the pollen of breviaries, noctuaries, bestiaries: split silk and tumbrils, aesthetic horses and ruined Abbeys. The lament for Dido opening up such pits of emotion in my brain that I fell upon my knees, and shattered in little pieces in the hearth. The forest opening its eyes of frost, the unborn morning of the world, the dew in a sheet, the trees stifled in feathers. The great orchestra hymning gruffly among its ants, gathering and breaking in time to the sea. The hot lick of the winter rain, blinding us all from coast to shabby coast. Or Pat going quietly mad among the sprained spires of Oxford. Your room, with the gramophone like a broken womb emptying Beethoven over us. This is the world which was implicit in our extravagant gust, our laughter, our tears, our poems. That is why, when I tell you I have rejected it, I want you to understand clearly the terms of that rejection. That is an England I am going to kill, because by giving it a quietus once and for all, I can revive it! This is not a flashy paradox, but something I have experienced, something that I have suffered. Understand me. It is not very difficult. The gulls are wheeling again, in their soft terror, the rooks are uneasy. In the gloom down below they light the candles and begin—the soft elegant litanies of religion. It is an apocalyptic moment, between heaven and earth. We are hanging over the minute, crawling town, while the bells open up. Under our feet the tower rocks at each impact of the vesper bell. A train snores outward, along the hills, into the past. The decision is made. I am no longer softened by tears or doubts. I have become as hard as a bronze medal. What it cost me to maintain this terrible equilibrium, to become responsible only to myself for what I am—that is not the important thing. The important thing is this: if I succeed, and I will succeed, then I shall become, in a sense, the first Englishman. I tell you this in confidence, because afterwards, when the great struggle is over, and the whole psyche of our nation—our world—is thrown back into gear, then there will be plenty of time for understanding, analysing, wondering. It is now, while the duel is on, that your understanding is valuable. This is all I can say. From that rare latitude, which I carry with me wherever I go, under the Equator or over the Poles, I write you this valediction and greeting. Affectionately Yours, Hamlet’s little godchild.